Eddie Izzard - live with Great Expectations
Image: Sussex Life.
What links Eddie Izzard, a modernist masterpiece in East Sussex and a world-important treasure hidden in Wisbech? The answer (did you guess?) is Charles Dickens.
Last Thursday I happened to be in Bexhill on Sea when the poster advertised a live performance that very evening. It was none other than the comedian Eddie Izzard promising a performance (or maybe a riff) on ‘Great Expectations’. The show indeed was called ‘Expectations on Great Expectations.’
The venue (and weather that day) could not have been better. The De La Warr Pavilion is a masterpiece of modernism. The Grade 1 listed building dominates the Bexhill seafront in (one has to say) a theatrically incongruous way. The enormous edifice in gleaming creamy concrete and glass was erected in 1935 to winning designs by European masters Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff. Its eye-trapping feature is the gorgeously curved external stairway up to the deck-shaped open-air rooftop giving marvellous views of the English Channel (gloriously benign that evening).
Our pre-booked seats were marked out with suitable Covid spacing and a small stage was at the ready near the opposite end of the space.
Without fanfare, Izzard appeared rocking on his impossibly high heels, red patterned dress waving in the gentle breeze. Trying to avoid the diving seagulls over his head, the performer told us how he’d been born 150 years to the day of Dickens’ own birthday. ‘It always meant something to me but I didn’t know what’, he confessed. ‘But it’s a little-known fact that Charles Dickens predicted that in 2020 a transvestite man would perform “Great Expectations” on a rooftop in Bexhill’. And here he was doing just that.
Before he began in earnest he asked for a show of hands for those who knew, or didn’t know, the story. The many abstentions drew a few light-hearted comments but it was clear that Eddie was not here to be a comedian but rather a living echo of the great novelist’s own gift for the public readings of his works. For the next 100 minutes, Izzard raced through a heavily abridged version of the 1861 novel. He voiced the authorial Pip, and the main supporting cast of Joe, Estelle, Miss Haversham, Herbert Pocket, Jaggers, the gruff convict Magwitch et al.
Armed only with a microphone, Eddie’s gig was like watching a live audiobook. Izzard stayed firmly between the covers of the book, only once coming out of characters to urge a garrulous gull to shut its gob. I’m not sure if the audience were expecting more of the comedian Eddie, but here they got only Izzard the Actor. He describes the show as a work in progress and thus the occasional stumble and self-correction were totally forgiven especially under the weight of learning all that text. As with any reading of a novel, it was good to hear the author’s voice (lightly disguised as the boy with the expectations) and for me the most enjoyable part of the evening was listening to Dickens’ own mellifluous melee of beautifully chosen words. In terms of character creation – Eddie is not a natural. He was good on Magwitch’s growl, and Joe’s country burr but to be honest most of his array of folk sounded like, well, Eddie Izzard.
There may be plans to tour this show but I doubt whether such a stunning venue as the De La Warr could be found (perhaps the top of the University Library tower?). If you are one those not familiar with the story, it is best to mug up the main drift as Izzard’s delivery pours out like a swirling cataract, a Niagara of Dickens.
The final moments of the set, the moving reconciliation between the formerly hard-hearted Estelle and the yearning older Pip, were executed with warmth and touching sincerity. Izzard’s humble bow to close the show reminded me of the far from humble final full stop in Dickens’ own handwritten manuscript of Great Expectations. Where is that? Tis in our own county, in the Fenland and District Museum in the lovely heart of Wisbech. Some years ago I was lucky enough to see the final page scrawled in the novelist’s own spidery handwriting there in the backroom of the Wisbech museum. Dickens’ final full stop that brought the story to its ambivalent end (do Pip and Estelle live happily thereafter?) was what I wanted to see. And there it was – the point on Dicken’s inky nib had gone straight through the page. Ah, if only one could have heard the author reading his favourite novel there on that balmy rooftop on the south coast. There would have been larks!
